Cooling current semiconductor structures presents significant challenges for traditional cooling structures, such as fan-mounted heat sinks and heat pipes. For instance, modern high performance processors have very high heat dissipation requirements, but traditional cooling structures cannot satisfy these requirements. Fan-mounted heat sinks often do not move sufficient air quickly enough to cool a modern processor. Similarly, heat pipes are limited in both the amount of heat they can dissipate and the distance they can move the heat from the heat source. Hence, conventional cooling techniques that use heat pipes or fan-mounted heat sinks are not adequate for cooling modern electronics.
These limitations are even more apparent with systems that incorporate multiple electronic components, each generating heat. For example, high performance laptops are increasingly used as replacements for desktop systems. These laptops integrate on a small footprint many electronics components such as CPUs, graphics processors, and memory hub controllers. System-level and component-level cooling solutions each has its drawbacks.
System-level solutions are sub-optimal because any solution optimized for one system is necessarily sub-optimal for another system. Cooling solutions addressing cooling on an individual component basis decreases the system reliability by requiring additional critical components, joints, and connections, failure of any one of which could cause a system failure.